PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland -- Two-time major winner Bryson DeChambeau said Tuesday he believes LIV Golf is moving in the right direction while acknowledging the process is taking longer than they would have expected.
"We're okay with that," DeChambeau said. "We're commercializing. We've got some good partners aboard with us now."
While LIV has continued to add sponsors for several of its teams and recently announced their full slate of 2026 events, the league's TV ratings have not improved by much. According to a report by Sports Business Journal, LIV's ratings during last weekend's tournament in Spain on Fox Sports topped out at 334,000 viewers. By comparison, the Scottish Open drew just over 1.6 million viewers.
Since adding Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton in 2023, LIV hasn't had any more major additions to its group of players. Meanwhile, the Saudi-backed entity has undergone organizational makeover.
In November of last year, LIV announced it would be replacing former CEO Greg Norman with Scott O'Neill. Since then, O'Neill has started to institute some changes, including reapplying for Official World Golf Ranking points.
"LIV Golf is committed to working together with the Official World Golf Ranking and its board to ensure the very best players are competing in the game's most prestigious events," O'Neill said in a statement. "We are confident our application addresses the outstanding questions that exist to support a more global, all-encompassing, and accurate ranking system. We are hopeful the review and approval process can progress ahead of the 2026 major season."
LIV's first application in October 2023 was denied by the OWGR, which said that they could not fairly compare LIV Golf with the two dozen other tours around the world because of its 54-hole tournaments and individual scores counting toward a team result.
Since then, LIV halted all efforts to comply with OWGR's stipulations while some of its players tumbled down the world rankings, preventing them from qualifying for certain major championships. Rahm, for example, is currently ranked 72nd in the world.
"I don't know, do you guys think we should get points? I would say that we've got some pretty good players over there [in LIV]," DeChambeau said. "Going through the right process is important, and I think Scott and all of us are looking forward to going through that process and getting it done the right way. We're excited for that."
When asked about what changes LIV could make to its application to make it more likely that the league would get OWGR points, DeChambeau said that, while he's not in the room when such conversations are occurring, he sees the possibility to use relegation, more pathways into LIV and an "association" to a global tour that would be a feeder system into LIV as options.
"Obviously the world ranking points is huge," DeChambeau said. "I think it's big for us to have these players that are just jumping onboard still collect points. They are deserving of it. They're playing some incredible golf every week, and I think having a system in place for us as players would benefit the ecosystem of the game tremendously, especially for fans."
DeChambeau also noted Tuesday that O'Neill is friendly with incoming PGA Tour CEO Scott Rolapp, perhaps to signal that the two may be more predisposed to working together to find a solution.
"I think there's something that can get done in a good way for the game of golf," DeChambeau said. "I'm really excited for the future of the game. There's a lot of positive movement going on currently."